The Baby Steps for the Indian Exporter - The First Month

Plenty of success stories around Indian Exporters, who started from scratch, and went on to build a business empires and start export houses.  Plenty of highly motivating YouTube videos around.  Many people want to jump in.  And flourish.  

Here is how it evolves - sharing real-time experience..

The first month journey - Getting your house setup:

• Attend an Export Training program to get an understanding of export market and understand various regulations and incoterms - INR 5,000 to INR 10,000, depending on the institute you want to get trained from

• Identify the product that you want to export, and have a tie-up with various suppliers and get into a mechanism to get daily quotes from various suppliers for your product - very very very important - try to identify your Unique Selling Proposition - why should someone buy from you in a competitive market - keep building this - as this will be a continous process

• Identify your target markets - it could be countries that are closer to you - Sri Lanka, Bangaladesh, Qatar, Oman, UAE, Malaysia, Singapore (OR) you can go for high-yielding markets like Europe, Americas or Australia

• Get your IE Code - INR 1,500 to INR 5,000 depending on who you go to

• Get various RCMC like FIEO, APEDA, CDB and the likes - INR 20,000 to INR 30,000 - Optional to start with, but good to have

• Get your GST - mandatory - typically the consultants who get your IE Code will help you with your GST setup process as well 

• Get your Current Account Set - Choose the bank with Forex division

• Get your website up and running - INR 10,000 to INR 35,000 

• Get a B2B portal membership - INR 25,000 to INR 1,00,000

• Arrive at costing on what your selling price would be for your product range

• Get a small-exporter policy from ECGC to cover your risks - INR 5,000

• Mobilize working capital ( a good starting working capital would be INR 5 Lakhs )

All groundwork done, and you are ready to go .... Month 2 reckoning - we will cover Month 2 journey in the next blog....